Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen

Scholars attempting to place Veblen in a particular intellectual tradition will only succeed in reaping frustration and confusion until it is recognized that he was primarily ^Isui generis^R and eclectic. This is the recurring theme that is made explicit in the introduction, conclusion, and some of the chapters of this work. Veblen was a thinker of such depth and power that he was able to create his own intellectual paradigm. The result of his endeavors is that more than a few intellectuals including his followers, the institutional economists, have spent their careers trying to understand the paradigm and to develop it in several directions for their own purposes.

?Tilman's study is an insightful contribution to Veblen scholarship and to the intellectual history of the era from 1890 to 1920. Tilman has exploited materials from archival sources neglected by his predecessors to establish in detail relationships between Veblen and other thinkers that earlier scholars only hinted at or disregarded altogether....Using his trove of new material, Tilman has produced the best interpretation of Veblen's personality and intellectual influence since Joseph Dorfman's Thorstein Veblen and His America....Legacy establishes Veblen as an eclectic thinker--one who synthesized ideas drawn from others into a unique system of social theory--and Tilman as the premier Veblen scholar of this generation.?-Business Library Review, "Tilman's study is an insightful contribution to Veblen scholarship and to the intellectual history of the era from 1890 to 1920. Tilman has exploited materials from archival sources neglected by his predecessors to establish in detail relationships between Veblen and other thinkers that earlier scholars only hinted at or disregarded altogether....Using his trove of new material, Tilman has produced the best interpretation of Veblen's personality and intellectual influence since Joseph Dorfman's Thorstein Veblen and His America....Legacy establishes Veblen as an eclectic thinker--one who synthesized ideas drawn from others into a unique system of social theory--and Tilman as the premier Veblen scholar of this generation."-Business Library Review

RICK TILMAN is Professor of Public Administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Dr. Tilman is the author of C. Wright Mills: A Native Radical and the American Intellectual Tradition (1984), Thorstein Veblen and His Critics 1891-1963 (1992), and A Veblen Treasury (1993).